Here are two stories about a teacher I've heard first hand. I'm going to call her Mrs. Adams.

On the first day of school Mrs. Adams told her students that she would take them to the office and paddle them (it's legal in Mississippi) for misbehavior, to which a student responded, "My momma told me to hit you in the face if you touched me." Mrs. Adams remained calm and waited until students were on their way out of the room to deal with the situation. While the class was walking out the door, she told the student in question to wait. As soon as everyone was out of the room and said, "Stand up! It's time for you to be a man. You go ahead and hit me in the face. Go ahead. I can't wait 'till you do, 'cause when you do they're going to have to pry me off of you. The po-lice can charge me, that's fine. The only question is whether the charge will be aggrevated assault or murder. And then I'll be sitting in my cell just thinking to myself, 'Is he dead?'" She hasn't had many problems with him this year.

Yesterday Mrs. Adams had a parent came in after school to address concerns about something Mrs. Adams said to her daughter. The student used to be one of mine (before we went back to self-contained classrooms). As I understand it, the student's mom claimed that Mrs. Adams had called her daughter a liar. The mother was expecting an apology. But, as Mrs. Adams put it, "She didn't realize I'm not workin' with a full deck." Not surprisingly, the two got into an argument, which quickly escalated to yelling and the parent "jumping" at the teacher. At this point another teacher saw what was going on and rushed in. The second teacher, usually shy and reserved pulled some bass out of her timid voice and yelled at the other two. She told Mrs. Adams to sit down and the parent to go to the front of the school. Mrs. Adams sat down and the parent left, perhaps realizing that Mrs. Adams' was actually ready to throw down. Had the two not been separated, there would definitely have been a fight between these two juggernauts. Mrs. Adams told us that she would absolutely would not have backed down. Plus, she's in the theacher's union, so she'd be protected legally.